Burned Books Novels & Stories

"I tried drying with iron, but I burned the pages." Who dries a book with an iron? Couldn't he borrow my hair dryer? "My book. Where is it?" "Wait here." He ducked into his room whilst I tried to control my anger. Alina, it was just a book. It didn't matter. You could buy another. You could read it again and paste the notes. But that was my book. Nobody messes with my book. He burnt my book. He murdered my book. He was a murderer. "Your book." I stared at the almost destroyed cover and opened to find dark brown iron marks and spilled coffee marks. "We will go to book shopping."

Then fell back into his unending abyss of silence. And while the fires licked out of control at Honeycomb Haven, spreading from the upright wooden box-hives to Cassie Patrick’s house and the outbuildings, the Gospel Book Store downtown blazed away itself like a beacon in the night—having been similarly torched—its hundreds of Bibles burning and melting, turning to holy ash inside the structure, before Glee Deadmond even had the chance to purchase a new one to replace her old.

I leaned closer, anticipation buzzing in my veins— Only to freeze. Books. Shelves and shelves of them, stretching from top to bottom. Old ones. Ancient-looking, with worn spines and faded gold lettering. Dusty, but organized with meticulous care. My shoulders slumped. “Seriously?” I muttered. Why warn me off if this was all there was? Then I saw it. A small, folded piece of white paper resting innocently among the books. My heart kicked. I snatched it up and unfolded it— And rage hit me full-force.

thermal acceleration" —none of which made much sense to me. But as I flipped further into the journal, the entries became more personal. More frantic. {The project is spiraling out of control. We thought we could contain it, but the models were wrong. The simulations were wrong. We’re not prepared for what’s coming.} {The heat is spreading faster than we anticipated. The atmosphere is destabilizing. There’s no stopping it now. God help us all.} My heart began to race as I read the final few entries, the words scrawled hastily, as if the person writing them had been in a panic. {The Burning is inevitable. We’ve failed. There’s nothing left but survival.}

Lana sighed. Lana almost tempted me to show her. That's when I decided to burn every book I owned. My neighbor Presley was never the same after the police and Bruce questioned Jude. It was late at night and I used my firepit to burn my books. The smell wasn't inviting like hickory charcoal. Presley was cleaning his grill as he often does. He tried to peek my way, but once he saw me glaring at him, he stopped what he was doing and hurried inside.

Division 24 The man looked confused. "The deaths? It has been peaceful in this area." Beatrice frowned. "How so." She mumbled to see a figure leave the church through the other door close to a burner. "Ha! Something is burning." She said, and the father turned to have his eyes widened. They both walked to the pulpit of the church and behold a book was on the burner while the fiery fire burned. Father Jude had gone to bring water to quench the fire and when the fire that had been burning was quenched, Beatrice squinted her eyes to see that three of the books in the burner had burnt to ashes but one had not burned..not a single scratch on its body.

“Maybe… maybe not. Totally up to you all.” I stood up and picked up the document sleeve. I walked to the study fireplace, which had a low fire going because the morning was cold, and I held the sleeve over it for a moment. Nobody stopped me. Nobody spoke. I put it in. The bound record caught slowly at first, the old pages resisting, and then the binding gave way and the whole thing went in a clean sustained burn that lasted about forty seconds. The handwriting, the working, the theory and execution of thirty years of Seraphine's obsession, reduced to ash in the fireplace of the house it had been aimed at destroying.

A handful of volumes wore painstaking repairs where burnt pages had been reinforced with impossibly thin sheets of parchment. She drifted towards one such shelf almost unconsciously. The nearest book looked as though someone had snatched it from a fire moments before it was lost forever. Its spine had split, the edges of its pages darkened to deep brown, while careful stitches held the binding together with remarkable precision. She looked back at Arkael. "I thought..." Her words faltered. Apollo's voice echoed unexpectedly through her memory. I burnt every Emberborn history. Her fingers hovered just above the damaged cover. "I thought they were destroyed."

Then the poetry. Handwritten. Sometimes sonnets. Sometimes messy, jagged pieces that felt like they’d been ripped straight from his chest. One read: If I could be the rain that slips down your shoulder, If I could be the sky you look up at in rage I’d let you strike me down, again and again, If only to stay close to your fire. I threw that one in the trash. Three hours later, it was tucked inside the cash register. And then came the books. First editions. Stories I’d loved. Stories I’d once read aloud to Damien in the Blackwood library when we were young and tangled in something that felt like forever.

The air in the car is too hot, too heavy and too much that even opening of the door does nothing to soothe the burning inside. I feel like my body is on fire. Their attention always burns me up and I love every second of it, it's all I've ever wanted…all I've ever needed. “Jennie you must be really tired, you look wrecked” my stepfather says as we step out of the car and I am being supported by my stepbrothers to stand straight.